Building on the foundation presented the first week, knowledge and skills will be expanded and tied together. Leading to a final real life design exercise, mapping and placing elements within a holistic design. Including: Natural Building, Solar Design, Climatic considerations, Eco-Village, Community Structures, Urban Design, Aquaculture, Animal Husbandry, Alternative Governance. Design groups will present to the class for critique and comment. Optional on-site Camping with some meals will be available the last three days, providing opportunities to immerse in the design process.

Audience: Students, landscaper, architect, developers, homesteaders, community planers, farmers, gardeners, or those seeking to be certified in Permaculture Design.

The PDC1 and PDC2 curriculum covers a wide variety of subjects. The weeks are stand-alone with the first week being a broad overview of design principles and strategies and the second week focusing on their practical application. Together the two weeks constitute the 72-Hour Design Permaculture Certification Course as designed by Permaculture co-founder, Bill Mollison. Students who complete the full two-week curriculum earn the internationally recognized Permaculture Design Consultant Certification. To date, thousands of permaculture designers worldwide have been certified through this course, and now comprise a global network of educators and ecological activists who influence major corporations, individuals creating new business alternatives, and groups of committed people working together to change the way we view and design into our landscapes.

Below is are each week’s course schedule. The order of topics in a course may change due to the presence of guest instructors, and emphasis on certain subjects may shift due to the needs and focus of the participants, such as urban or rural residents, city planners, farmers, and so on. This course will not make you an expert in any of the individual subjects covered, although in many cases we go into considerable depth. The point of the course is to introduce you to the relationships and synergies among the disciplines that permaculture connects. In a sense, permaculture creates an ecology made up of the many tools and concepts used to design sustainable communities. You will learn what these tools are and how to decide which to use, and when. The course will show you how these subjects connect. Then, after the course, you can go into whatever depth you desire in your specific areas of interest.

Ecological Systems Design Intensive:PDC1First week: July 6th – 11th

Day 1: Foundations of Permaculture
Course overview and logistics; permaculture defined; observation skills; ethics and the basis of ecological design; permaculture principles, indicators of sustainability, and how to use them.

Day 2: Design for Pattern Literacy
Designing from patterns to details; natural patterns as a design tool; the permaculture design process; methods of design; the Zone and Sector System.

Day 3: Thinking Like a Watershed
The water cycle; Catching and storage water; designing tanks, cisterns, and other water storages. Roof-top water catchments

Day 4: The Path to Water Wisdom
Ponds, swales, and keyline design; water in the permaculture landscape; greywater and blackwater system design; aquaculture.

Day 6: A Revolution Disguised as Gardening
How ecosystems work; the home garden; plants of many functions; polycultures; integrating animals and insects into the garden; pest management; wildlife habitat

Day 4: Thinking Globally: Permaculture for Different Climates and Densities
Tropical, Dryland, and Temperate strategy review. Designing for urban, suburban, or rural situations.

Day 5: Green Economics, Right Livelihood and Community Building
Money, finance, and local currency networks; permaculture in education; green business guilds and networks; building social capital. Community dynamics; intentional communities, ecovillages, and group decision-making processes.

Day 6: Putting it Together: The Design Project Presentations
Group design project presentations; Where to from here? Finding your ecological niche.

Who Would Benefit From This Course?

This course teaches you to observe at various levels — cycles in nature, movements in history, practices across cultures, patterns in social behavior and increase one’s awareness to learn how to interact harmoniously with nature to achieve your goals. The Permaculture Design Course will help jump start one’s learning curve on all these fronts.

Permaculture uses ecological principles to design sustainable human communities that are harmoniously woven into the environment, aiming to have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. Design professionals can add new qualifications to their resumes and offer improved services to their clients. Their designs tend to use fewer resources, work more efficiently, and are easier to maintain. Most participants find the course life-changing, and they form powerful new viewpoints and enhanced social networks.

– Homeowners, gardeners, and farmers learn to increase the value and productivity of their property and to create home and land environments that better support their own needs as well as nature’s.

– Real estate, construction, and development professionals are able to better address the public’s growing concern for the environment and to reduce resource use and impacts.

– Educators learn to integrate permaculture design into their curriculum in ways that have been proven to raise student performance.

– Planners and public officials find holistic solutions to land-use and resource issues, and will identify and solve bottlenecks and impediments to implementing their programs.

– Energy, water, and waste-systems workers will learn holistic management strategies for integrating their projects into the larger community.

The Permaculture Design Course is one of the few educational systems in the world of its size that allows so much freedom to students and teachers alike. The course material and presentation is structured to address different learning styles. Each topic expands and deepens our understanding of the previous topics, so the knowledge and understanding of the student is gradually built up. The permaculture design course teaches whole-systems thinking. Systems thinking focuses on the relationships among the parts, the features that emerge from these relationships.

Design Exercises help bring this into application and make corrections. Just as the course material is vast in its size and scope, the course presentation too extends beyond the classroom teaching, design exercises and audio-visual sessions. Permaculture flows over to the meals shared, nature walks/garden visits, learning new practical skills and checking theoretical learning with experiments.

What does a Permaculture Design Certificate enable you to do?

With this certificate a graduate may confidently use the word ‘permaculture’ in the promotion of their work or business world wide. During the course the students are made aware of various ethically profitable business opportunities that exist in today’s changing world scenario. This might include:

– I just wanted to say thanks again for a really great workshop at your farm. The format worked very well, loved all the hands on. Please extend thanks to all the instructors they did a great job.” Mat, P.

– “I feel this class has met my expectations and can see it exceeding them as it continues. I really look forward to the upcoming modules and guest instructors.” Steve, W.

Watch it here!

Humanity is more than ever threatened by its own actions; we hear a lot about the need to minimize footprints and to reduce our impact. But what if our footprints were beneficial? What if we could meet human needs while increasing the health and well-being of our planet? This is the premise behind permaculture: a design process based on the replication of patterns found in nature. INHABIT explores the many environmental issues facing us today and examines solutions that are being applied using the ecological design lens of permaculture. Focused mostly on the Northeastern and Midwestern regions of the United States, Inhabit provides an intimate look at permaculture peoples and practices ranging from rural, suburban, and urban landscapes.

watch it now!

Humanity is more than ever threatened by its own actions; we hear a lot about the need to minimize footprints and to reduce our impact. But what if our footprints were beneficial? What if we could meet human needs while increasing the health and well-being of our planet? This is the premise behind permaculture: a design process based on the replication of patterns found in nature. INHABIT explores the many environmental issues facing us today and examines solutions that are being applied using the ecological design lens of permaculture. Focused mostly on the Northeastern and Midwestern regions of the United States, Inhabit provides an intimate look at permaculture peoples and practices ranging from rural, suburban, and urban landscapes.